Building Email Marketing Leads of Niche Marketing Newbies

Here are some of the specifics of how. Many of these tips can be found on any email marketing best practices list, but this particular list is specifically selected and slanted to what coaches need to accomplish.

1) Offer a lead magnet or free report that solves a common problem.

Offer your site visitors an ebook or a checklist that would be irresistible to your ideal clients, and immediately start seeing your list become a source for business. You can think of this as a way to build your list, but you can also think of it as a screening mechanism: You know the people who sign up for your list are at least motivated to take this step. If your existing lead magnet is not doing well (for example, it's getting less than a 2% opt-in rate), it may be because you aren't offering a solution that people are motivated enough to solve.



2) Set up an autoresponder to continue the conversation.

As mentioned above, coaching services have a long sales cycle. You can certainly nurture leads through a weekly email newsletter, but it might work better to walk people through a series of emails specifically designed to take them from point A to point B in your "buying cycle".

If you have trouble getting a weekly newsletter out, and autoresponder can be even more valuable. If you schedule your autoresponders to go out once a week, your readers might not even realize they're on an autoresponder. That makes for one less weekly marketing task for you.



3) Send a welcome email to new subscribers and ask them what they're struggling with, or what their most pressing question is.

Include a short introduction to your work in this email, even if it's just a list of your most popular articles or blog posts. Remember: They may never be as interested in you or your work as they are when they first sign up for your list. Capitalize on this by offering them your best content.



4) Try webinars or public speaking to build your email list.

Many marketing pros name webinars as the most effective list-building tactic they have. Whether you want to build your list or to show off your expertise, webinars are a great way to get in front of your audience and deliver value. And because coaching is so often a two-way conversation, hosting a webinar is a terrific way for you to experience first-hand what your audience responds to or not. The only better tactic might be public speaking.



5) Partner with other coaches by guest posting, doing webinars.

This is a spin-off of the tactic above. If your list is small or you have trouble assembling a big enough audience to make a webinar worthwhile, partner with one of two other coaches or consultants. You'll pool your marketing resources, your expertise and your audience. It's a win for everyone.

For the past 16 years, I've been monetizing 3rd party data (email) using PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers.

If you're not familiar with 3rd party data, it's data that the users have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record for all users and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

I either purchase the data or I get it through rev-share deals. Rev-share (revenue sharing) is data that you get for $0 upfront cost and you split the revenue generated from sending it, with the data provider.

The data is targeted based on specific vertical (niche) that the users have shown an interest in or requested more information about. So everything starts with the data, in that based on the vertical that you are getting data for, you then send a relevant offer.

I mainly get data that is targeted to verticals for PPL offers. This is because lead generation offers do not require a credit card or for the user to purchase anything to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher than offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them. This is what has overall worked best for me and tends to have the greatest amount of mass appeal (will be of interest to a very large general audience). So the potential to generate high volume exists and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

The bulk of the offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead. I also promote offers that pay more and less, but the amount of the payout is not the key deciding factor. How well an offer converts can be just as important, if not more important. For example, you could have an offer that only pays $9. However, if it converts at 2X or better compared to a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same or possibly even better. You could also have an offer that pays $90, but if it converts poorly, it may not even be worth sending it.

Bottom line, it is far easier to get someone to fill out a short form than it is to get them to take out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle trying to make sales, when you can just provide free info that users want / need and get paid well doing it.

Some of the verticals that I have done extremely well with are: insurance, education, debt, credit, mortgage, loans, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

So for example, if I'm getting auto insurance data, I then send an auto insurance offer. If I'm getting education data, then I send an education offer, etc, etc... Then after a certain amount of time, I then cross promote the offers to fully monetize the data.

3rd party data will rarely be as responsive as a highly targeted opt-in list you build yourself. But it really doesn't matter. Because you are getting the data much much cheaper and it is highly scalable. The way that you make it work is to always be segmenting your opens / clickers - removing the unresponsive user. That way over time you are building smaller, but much more responsive lists. Essentially you are converting the data from quantity to quality.

Basically, I monetize the data using PPL offers because they offer the path of least resistance to generating conversion and converting the data to cash producing assets.

Obviously, there is far more to it, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that may sound like a huge range, much comes down to one's abilities to scale and to cost effectively build/manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

Anyway, something to think about.

Hey, you're not alone, my friend.

Your frustration is absolutely normal, and if you didn't run into these
challenges, I would say that you are not being honest, hehe.

Remember, fundamental Marketing principles apply,
even in the email marketing space.

Start with really thinking about who your target customer is.

I was talking to my 12-year old son about this concept just yesterday.

I'll give you the example I gave my son:

Let's say you have a drone that you want to sell.

You go to the mall and are allowed to choose any place
to show potential customers.

So I asked my son, "where would you go?"

He said without hesitation, "the food court!"
"Because there are so many people there!"

I said, "sure, you can go there, however, most are there to eat".

Then I made the recommendation,

"Do you think standing in front of the toy store or
one of the hobby stores would maximize your chances
of finding people who could be interested in buying a drone?"

See, before thinking of your lead magnet, autoresponder,
and the types of emails to be sending your list,
you first have to put honest time into thinking about
WHO your target customers are, and where they hang out.

Here's the thing though, expect to try different places.

Every marketer has to test different places to show their offer.

Once you figure out WHO and WHERE,
then you can move forward and come up with an offer
that they WANT (not need).

That's a whole new conversation, hehe.

Hope that got you thinking a bit more :-)

Great luck to you!